Tag Archives: adoption

I am not a gamification expert. In fact, until today, I was skeptical of the potential effectiveness of the gamification of work in changing employee behavior and performance. I have consistently advised my software vendor clients that gamification is a wild card, because the value of gamifying enterprise software has not been demonstrated beyond question.

My outlook on gamification changed instantly today, while reading a New York Times Magazine article written by Charles Duhigg and shared on Twitter by Sameer Patel, whose value judgements and recommendations I very much trust. The article, which is actually an extended book excerpt, is not about gamification. Rather, it is about the application of analytics and behavioral science to large retailers’ marketing efforts. However, what I learned reading the article changed my perspective on the gamification of work by revealing a scientific basis for why it must succeed, if properly applied.

Duhigg tells the story of Target’s efforts to use customer purchase and demographic data to identify which of its female customers were in the second trimester of a pregnancy, so the retailer could shift those customers’ in-store and online buying habits. While that story is fascinating in itself, Duhigg’s explanation of the behavioral science on which retailers build their marketing strategies is what made me rethink my position on the gamification of work.

Behavioral scientists have shown that habits – routines that we largely perform subconsciously – are developed responses to a consistent, reoccurring stimulus. We repeat the action (habit) every time our brain is cued by the stimulus because doing so produces a mental, emotional, or physical reward. The more we repeat this cue-routine-reward loop, the further ingrained the habit becomes.

As Duhigg explains with an extended anecdote about Proctor & Gamble’s marketing efforts around its Febreze product, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to create a new habit in a vacuum. The only way to effectively change a habit is to embed it in an established cue-routine-reward loop, replacing the old routine with a new one. This is the scientific key to why the gamification of work is not just bogus theory.

For gamification to be effective, new behavioral routines must be applied when triggered by a specific work stimulus and yield already desired rewards. If we understand the cues that trigger unproductive habits for workers, as well as the rewards they derive from applying those routines, we can replace those unproductive actions with more productive ones.

Most examples of work gamification that I have seen ignore the existence of cues completely. Gamification elements are constantly present, rather than appearing only under specific conditions. Embed it and they will play.

Furthermore, gamification has too often been explained in terms of changing the rewards when, in fact, it is about changing the behaviors themselves. Behavioral science has demonstrated that changing the reward does not change the behavior. Rather, the routine must change, and the new, desired behavior must be linked to an existing, desired reward that motivates an employee.

Other Thoughts Related to This Behavioral Science

The behavioral science behind Target’s and P&G’s efforts to alter customer’s buying habits can be applied to any other situation in which change is desired to affect positive performance outcomes. Unproductive work habits is one area, as discussed above. Another is the adoption of new enterprise software.

If organizations tied usage of new software to the specific cues and rewards associated with existing work tasks and habits, adoption would rocket up the desired hockey-stick curve. Both the use cases and the benefits would be crystal clear to employees, eliminating two of the most significant barriers to the mainstream adoption of new software. The “what’s in it for me” would be immediately obvious to the workers to whom the new software has been launched. Change communication (and application training) would still be critical, but the creating the associated messages would be greatly simplified, as they are already known.

As demonstrated in Duhigg’s article, behavioral scientists (and retailers) also understand that there are a few specific, life-altering events that provide the perfect window in which influencers can change an individual’s seemingly intractable habits. Events such as graduating from college, changing employment, getting married, buying a house, and yes, having a baby, disrupt peoples’ ingrained habits, or at least cause them to question their routines. As such, major life events offer influencers a very valuable opportunity to seed new habits that will then remain in place and unquestioned until the next big life event occurs.

Why is that important? Think about who in the enterprise is currently responsible for being aware of impending or recent employee major life changes, and helping employees minimize the effects that those changes may have on their work performance. Human Resources. Yes, HR is the corporate custodian of changes associated with employee life-events. As such, they are well-positioned to identify the optimal opportunities for changing an individual employee’s work habits in ways that will lead to improved performance. Managers directly supervising one or more employees are even better positioned to identify those performance change opportunities, as they often become aware of actual or planned employee life changes before HR knows about them.

Charles Duhigg’s book excerpt provided me with an ah-ha moment regarding the gamification of work. It also underscored how important the understanding of behavioral science is to affecting positive workplace transformation. Many of us focused on the intersection of business and technology too often are unaware of, or under-value, the contributions that social science has made to the understanding of organizational behavior. Thank you Mr. Duhigg (and Mr. Patel) for leading me to these insights today.

Milestone birthdays customarily spark reflection on the past and future of the celebrant. The Enterprise 2.0 Conference celebrated its 5th birthday last week with a solid program of pre-conference workshops, keynote speeches, and breakout sessions. The event, as always, provided attendees with a good feel for both the current state, as well as the future, of enterprise social software, networking, and business. This post will focus on insights, gleaned from the conference, about the here and now of social in the enterprise. A subsequent post will address the implications for its future.

Practice: A Bias Toward “How”

An early observation from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference was that several of the most visible “doers” of enterprise social were not participating this year. Dion Hinchcliffe, Gia Lyons, and David Armano (among others) were too busy helping customers plan and deliver enterprise social initiatives to attend. Their absence is, of course, a positive indicator of the current interest in, and embrace of, social activity in organizations.

Those who were at the conference also voiced a bias toward action. One of the most commonly heard pieces of feedback on the event was that the content focused too much on selling and justifying the concepts of E2.0 and social business. Attendees were looking for more information and knowledge about how to use social to successfully achieve business objectives. To paraphrase one attendee’s tweet, we get why, but thirst for how.

One tell-tale sign of this sentiment was the prevalence of the topic of adoption in informal conversations, despite it’s (intentional?) exclusion from the official E2.0 Conference program. Perhaps the early adopters who have attended multiple iterations of the conference have largely moved beyond adoption concerns, but the fresh faces at the event have not and asked for more of the kind of guidance provided in the pre-conference Practitioner’s Black Belt workshop.

Another indication of the need to understand how, as opposed to why, was the enthusiastically positive reactions to the conference sessions that dealt with topics such as organizational design and behavior, leadership, and performance management. Past E2.0 Conferences have conveniently put forth organizational culture as a bogey man standing in the way of adopting social behaviors and tools, without offering ways to affect cultural transformation. Several of this year’s sessions addressed concrete aspects of organizational change management. Most notable were the remarks delivered by Cisco’s Jim Grubb, Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden, Electronic Arts’ Bert Sandie, Deb Lavoy from OpenText, Amy Wilson of Wilson Insight, and Altimeter Group Fellow Marcia Connor.

Technology: Focus on Integration

It was clear before the conference even began that the topic of integration of newer social technologies with well-established enterprise systems would be front and center this year. While that topic was in the spotlight, the current lack of meaningful integration stood out against the talk of plans to integrate enterprise social software with other applications, systems, and business processes. The harsh truth is that the current crop of enterprise social software is dominated by stand-alone applications and suites – collaboration destinations that are not in the flow of work for most and that have created new silos of information and knowledge in organizations.

Enterprise social software vendors have begun to build and offer integrations between their systems of engagement and established systems of record (to use Geoffrey Moore’s crystal-clear terms) such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, and Enterprise Content Management. However, most of these integrations assume that the social application/suite will be the place where people do the majority of their work. Data and information from other enterprise systems are brought into the social layer, where it can be commented upon and shared (socialized) with others. This flies in the face of reality, as evidenced by the limited success of enterprise portals deployments intended to create a personalized aggregation layer sitting on top of existing enterprise systems. People want to communicate and collaborate with others in the original context of specific business tasks. Accordingly, social technology should be embedded (or, at least, exposed) in the systems of record where decisions are made and business process activities are completed, not the other way around.

It was interesting to observe that the need to integrate with systems of record was primarily voiced by enterprise social software vendors exhibiting at the E2.0 Conference. Those vendors claimed that their customers are demanding these integrations, but the topic did not prominently appear in customer-led sessions or conversations. Only one system of record was universally identified as a critical integration point – Microsoft SharePoint. This observation seems to underscore deploying organizations’ preference to communicate and collaborate directly in systems of record.

There was also much discussion of the need to integrate social into business processes themselves. A prominent theme from the E2.0 Conference was that enterprise social software can, and should, support specific business processes to make them more transparent and efficient. Presentations and vendor demos at the event revealed that the current generation of enterprise social software can effectively speed resolution of process exceptions through expertise location and engagement features. However, integration with normal business process activity is essentially non-existent in most enterprise social software offerings, and the vision of social process support remains unfulfilled.

Summary

The 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston was a very well run event that provided attendees with a fairly clear picture of the current state of enterprise social practices and technologies. It is clear that practitioners are past experimenting with social concepts and technologies and have moved on to applying them in their organizations. However, it also clear that practitioners need more information on how to organize for, lead, and incent social business practices. Social technology adoption remains a key concern for the second wave of adopters.

Over the last 5 years, enterprise social software has matured and added functionality needed to build comprehensive, enterprise-ready systems of engagement. However, integration of that functionality into the flow of work – within traditional enterprise systems of record and business processes – has yet to be achieved. It will be interesting to see if that marriage of social and transactional systems can be accomplished. If it can, we will have created next-generation technology that supports a new, better way of working.

Following my post last week on the need for additional filters in enterprise microblogging tools and activity streams, I participated in an interesting Twitter conversation on the subject of microblogging and complexity. The spontaneous conversation began when Greg Lowe, a well-respected Enterprise 2.0 evangelist at Alcatel-Lucent, asked:

“is microblogging autonomy about innovation, or simple elegance? More features usually leads to lower usability?”

And, later, he asked a complementary question:
“is there a risk of Microblogging becoming “too complicated”?”

Is Greg on to something here? Do more features usually lead to lower usability? Will functional innovation be the downfall of stand-alone microblogging solutions, or will it help them stay ahead of platform vendors as they incorporate microblogging into their offerings?

One of the commonly heard complaints about software in general, and enterprise software in particular, is that it is too complicated. There are too many features and functions, and how to make use of them is not intuitive. On the other hand, usability is a hallmark of Web 2.0 software, and, if we make it too complex, it is likely that some people will abandon it in favor of simpler tools, whatever those may be.

But that dichotomy does not tell the entire story. Based on anecdotal evidence (there is no published quantitative research available), early adopters of Web 2.0 software in the enterprise appear to value simplicity in software they use. However, as a colleague, Thomas Vander Wal, pointed out to me yesterday, that may not be true for later, mainstream adopters. Ease-of-use may be desirable in microblogging (or any other) software, but having adequate features to enable effective, efficient usage is also necessary to achieve significant adoption. Later adopters need to see that a tool can help them in a significant way before they will begin to use it; marginal utility does not sway them, even if the tool is highly usable.

Simple may not be sustainable. As I wrote last week in this post, as enterprise use of microblogging and activity streams has increased and matured, so has the need for filters. Individuals, workgroups, and communities want to direct micro-messages to specific recipients, and they need to filter their activity streams to increase their ability to make sense out of the raging river of incoming information. Those needs will only increase as more workers microblog and more information sources are integrated into activity streams.

In the public microblogging sphere, Twitter provides a solid example of the need to add functionality to a simple service as adoption grows in terms of registered users and use cases. As more individuals used Twitter, in ways that were never envisioned by its creators, the service responded by adding functionality such as search, re-tweeting, and lists. Each of these features added some degree of complexity to the service, but also improved its usability and value.

In the evolution of any software, there is a trade-off between simplicity and functionality that must be carefully managed. How does one do that? One way is to continuously solicit and accept user feedback. That allows the software provider and organizations deploying it to sense when they are nearing the point where functionality begins to overwhelm ease of use in a harmful manner. Another technique is to roll out new features in small doses at reasonable intervals. Some even advocate slipping new features in unannounced and letting users discover them for themselves. Hosted deployment of software (whether on-premise or off-site) makes this easier to do, since new features are automatically switched on for people using the software.

So back to the original question; can stand-alone microblogging solutions fend off the collaboration suite and platform vendors as they incorporate microblogging and activity streams in their offerings? My definitive answer is “yes”, because there is still room for functionality to be added to microblogging before it becomes over-complicated.

Based on the historical evolution of other software types and categories, it is likely that the smaller vendors, who are intensely focused on microblogging, will be the innovators, rather than the platform players. As long as vendors of stand-alone microblogging offerings continue to innovate quickly without confusing their customers, they will thrive. That said, a platform vendor could drive microblogging feature innovation if they so desired; think about what IBM has done with its Sametime instant messaging platform. However, I see no evidence of that happening in the microblogging sphere at this time.

The most plausible scenario is that at some point, small, focused vendors driving microblogging innovation (e.g. Socialcast, Yammer) will be acquired by larger vendors, who will integrate the acquired features into their collaboration suite or platform. My sense is that we are still 2-3 years away from that happening, because there is still room for value-producing innovation in microblogging.

The holidays are a busy time, especially the last week of December. Many of us take vacation that week, so it highly possible that you missed an interview that was published on December 30th.

Mark Fidelman, VP of Sales at Mindtouch, asked me earlier in the month if I would be willing to be interviewed by him on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 adoption. I said ‘yes’, of course, and we proceeded to conduct the interview by email.

Mark asked a dozen questions, so he decided to publish the interview in two installments. Part 1 was published on Mark’s blog, Seek Omega, on December 30th. It has also been published on the MindTouch blog and on CloudAve. The second installment of the interview will also appear on those sites, most likely next week.

I am grateful to Mark for this opportunity to share my views on Enterprise 2.0. More importantly, I hope that these interviews provide you with the kind of insight that you need to make decisions and take action. Please leave questions an comments on any of the sites at which the interview was posted. Alternatively, you may contact me at by email or on Twitter for elaboration on, or clarification of, any of the statements that I made in the interview.

On a related note, I have proposed to present a session on the Emergent Adoption Model at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this June. If you are interested in hearing more about Enterprise 2.0 adoption and plan to attend the event, please vote for my session proposal on the conference website (site registration required.) Thanks!

Salesforce.com today announced “a new secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform”, called Chatter. While it will not be available until an unspecified date in 2010, Chatter will likely raise the bar for Enterprise 2.0 software, because of the promised ability to embed its functionality into other enterprise applications.

Chatter includes many of the social components that are the core of existing Enterprise 2.0 software offerings: Profiles, Status Updates, Feeds, Groups (Communities), etc. What is different — and significant — about Chatter is that any of those components can be integrated inside any existing enterprise application, including Salesforce CRM and the 135,000 custom applications built on the Force.com platform. In short, Salesforce.com will not make users collaborate through the Chatter interface; they will be able to leverage Chatter’s social functionality in the context of work that they are doing inside a CRM, ERP, or other enterprise system.

The ability to deploy social functionality as a service within an existing (or new) enterprise application is a game changer. To-date, only one other E2.0 software vendor that I am aware of (MindTouch) has been able to make that claim. Salesforce.com is the first proprietary software provider with a very large set of enterprise customers and third-party developers to offer social functionality as building blocks (services) that can be consumed in other, independent applications.

Two other aspects of Chatter demand attention. First, at a time when established Enterprise 2.0 software vendors are touting their ability to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint (see my previous post, Integration of Social Software and Content Management Systems: The Big Picture), Salesforce.com has chosen to provide integration with Google Apps instead. Salesforce.com will use the Google Data APIs to enable data communication between Chatter and Google Apps. This is hardly a surprise, given that cloud computing is core to both companies.

The other striking aspect of Chatter is its embrace of popular consumer social networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter. This occurs at a time when many organizations are blocking employee access to those tools for security, privacy, and productivity reasons. Salesforce.com already features bi-directional communication between its Force.com platform and Facebook, having launched the Force.com for Facebook developer toolkit a year ago. Now Salesforce.com is providing a similar developer toolkit for Twitter.

Chatter is an announced offering, not a shipping product. As such, it is already being compared to Google Wave in the collaboration market. However, Chatter is much more likely to make a significant impact in the E2.0 space, because Salesforce.com has always been focused on enterprise customers, while Google’s offerings started as consumer products and have only recently begun to slowly gain traction within enterprises. Google may bring Wave out of beta before Salesforce.com launches Chatter, but I expect that will make little difference as to which one sees better enterprise adoption in 2010. It is very likely that more organizations will understand Chatter’s value proposition of easily integrated social functionality.

Box.net announced today that it has integrated its cloud-based document storage and sharing solution with Salesforce.com. Current Box.net customers that want to integrate with Salesforce CRM can contact Box.net directly to activate the service. Salesforce.com customers may now download Box.net from the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Box.net services will now be available in the Lead, Account, Contact, and Opportunity tabs of Salesforce CRM. In addition, the Box.net native interface and full range of services will be accessible via a dedicted tab on the Salesforce CRM interface. Users can upload new files to Box.net, edit existing files, digitally sign electronic documents, and e-mail or e-fax files. Large enterprise users will be given unlimited Box.net storage. The Box.net video embedded below briefly demonstrates the new Salesforce CRM integration.

While Box.net started as a consumer focused business, today’s announcement marks the first tangible manifestation of its emerging enterprise strategy. Box.net intends to be a cloud-based document repository that can be accessed through a broad range of enterprise applications.

The content-as-a-service model envisioned by Box.net will gain traction in the coming months. I believe that a centralized content repository, located on-premise or in the cloud, is a key piece of any enterprise’s infrastructure. Moreover, content services — functionality that enables users to create, store, edit, and share content — should be accessible from any enterprise application, including composite applications such as portals or mashups created for specific roles (e.g. sales and/or marketing employees, channel partners, customers). Users should not be required to interact with content only through dedicated tools such as office productivity suites and Content Management Systems (CMS).

Other content authoring and CMS software vendors are beginning to consider, understand, and (in some cases) embrace this deployment model. Box.net is one of the first proprietary software vendors to instantiate it. Adoption statistics of their new Salesforce CRM integration should eventually provide a good reading as to whether or not enterprise customers are also ready to embrace the content-as-a-service model.

People may be generally characterized as one of the following: optimists, realists, or pessimists. We all know the standard scenario used to illustrate these stereotypes.

Optimists look at the glass and say that it is partially full. Pessimists remark that the glass is mostly empty. Realists note that there is liquid in the glass and make no value judgment about the level.

The global Enterprise 2.0 community features the same types of individuals. I hear them speak and read their prose daily, noticing the differences in the way that they characterize the current state of the E2.0 movement. E2.0 evangelists (optimists) trumpet that the movement is revolutionary. Doubters proclaim that E2.0 will ultimately fail for many of the same reasons that earlier attempts to improve organizational collaboration did. Realists observe events within the E2.0 movement, but don’t predict its success or demise.

All opinions should be heard and considered, to be sure. In some ways, the position of the realist is ideal, but it lacks the spark needed to create forward, positive momentum for E2.0 adoption or to kill it. A different perspective is what is missing in the current debate regarding the health of the E2.0 movement.

Consider again the picture of the glass of liquid and the stereotypical reactions people have to it. Note that none of those reactions considers flow. Is the level of liquid in the glass rising or falling?

Now apply the flow question to the E2.0 movement. Is it gaining believers or is it losing followers? Isn’t that net adoption metric the one that really matters, as opposed to individual opinions, based on static views of the market, about the success or failure of the E2.0 movement to-date?

The E2.0 community needs to gather more quantitative data regarding E2.0 adoption in order to properly access the health of the movement. Until that happens, the current, meaningless debate over the state of E2.0 will continue. The effect of that wrangling will be neither positive or negative — net adoption will show little gain — as more conservative adopters continue to sit on the sideline, waiting for the debate to end.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that E2.0 adoption is increasing, albeit slowly. The surest way to accelerate E2.0 adoption is to go with the flow — to measure and publicize increases in the number of organizations using social software to address tangible business problems. Published E2.0 case studies are great, but until more of those are available, simply citing the increase in the number of organizations deploying E2.0 software should suffice to move laggards off the sideline and on to the playing field.